Madeleine (cake)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The madeleine or petite madeleine is a traditional cake from Commercy, a commune of the Meuse département in northeastern France.
Madeleines are very small cakes with a distinctive shell-like shape acquired from being baked in pans with shell-shaped depressions. Their flavour is similar to, but somewhat lighter than, pound cake, with a pronounced butter-and-lemon taste.
Some sources, including the New Oxford American Dictionary, say madeleines may have been named for a 19th century pastry cook, Madeleine Paulmier, but other sources have it that Madeleine Paulmier was a cook in the 18th century for Stanisław Leszczyński, whose son-in-law, Louis XV of France, named them for her.[1] The Larousse Gastronomique offers two conflicting versions of the Madeleine's history.[2]
Aside from the traditional moulded pan, commonly found in stores specialising in kitchen equipment and even hardware stores, few tools are required to make madeleines. Traditional recipes include very finely ground nuts (usually almonds) as well as common cake ingredients such as flour, eggs, butter, sugar and vanilla.
Madeleines were chosen to represent France in the Café Europe initiative of the Austrian presidency of the European Union, on Europe Day 2006.
[edit] The Proust connection
Madeleines are perhaps most famous outside France for their association with involuntary memory in the Marcel Proust novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past in the first translation, more recently translated as In Search of Lost Time), in which the narrator experiences an awakening upon tasting a madeleine with limeflower tea:
“She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…”
— Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann's Way.[3]
[edit] References
- ^ Ava Runge. "Madeleines," in La Città Viola, Issue 3, February 2007, published by the International School of Florence. (Article includes a recipe for Madeleines au Citron.) “Louis XV called this tiny pastry “Madeleine” for the first time in 1755 in honor of his father-in-law’s cook named Madeleine Paulmier. Louis' wife introduced them soon afterwards to the court in Versailles and they became loved all over France. Marcel Proust, a well-known author, describes Madeleines as “a little shell of cake, so generously sensual beneath the piety of its stern pleating…” Note: The url for this pdf file does not work, but a search for "La Citta Viola" will yield a link for "Issue 3 Feb 2007" which may be viewed as an html file.
- ^ Josh Friedland (18 April 2004). "Post-Proustian Madeleines." (html). TheFoodSection.com. “The historical origins of the madeleine are disputed, and Larousse Gastronomique relates two conflicting accounts of the cake’s invention. One story lays the origins of the madeleine at the feet of one Jean Avice, the “master of choux pastry,” who worked as a pastry chef for Prince Talleyrand. Avice is said to have invented the Madeleine in the 19th century by baking little cakes in aspic molds. Another account puts the origins of the madeleine much earlier, dating to the 1700s, when they were supposedly first made in the town of Commercy in Lorraine, then popularized at Versailles and later in Paris by Stanislas Leczinski, King of Poland and father-in-law of Louis XV.”
- ^ Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann's Way. English translation, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. London: Chatto and Windus, 1922. Excerpt retrieved online from Project Gutenberg e-Book of Volume 1.
